Paper Topic:

cognitive and affective psychology

Cognitive and Affective Psychology

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Date of Submission Cognitive and Affective Psychology

Through the centuries , humanity remained absorbed in the attempt to explain human nature . The philosophers speculated . Literary giants wrote of human passions , struggles , triumphs , and tragedies . But the facts were not available only personal opinion and guesswork . It was impossible to know for sure how we see and hear until modern science learned about light and sound waves and the way they affect nerve endings within the body . Human moods and emotions could

not be analyzed until science identified the substances secreted by the human glands and the complex way the glands interact with the brain . The process of heredity could not be understood until biologists discovered the chromosomes , genes , and the chemical key to life called DNA . The influence of environment was unclear until psychologists established the facts about learning and about development from infant to adult (Sternberg , 2006

Even today , we do not know the full story , and perhaps we never will for human behavior is so complex that it may forever defy complete understanding . But psychologists aided by the progress of other scientists have found some of the answers , and they are making new discoveries all the time . The psychological experiment , psychology itself , has come a long way since the science began . At the start , the idea of taking approach to the study of behavior required a radical shift in human thinking and invention of brand-new techniques of study The early psychologists lacked the tools necessary for sophisticated exploration (Buckley , 2001 . Nevertheless , they provided humanity five precursors to the development of cognitive psychology , namely functionalism , pragmatism , behaviorism , structuralism , and associationism

Factual : Five Antecedents to Cognitive Psychology

Functionalism

According to the theory of functionalism , mental events depend on primarily on the networks , pathways , and the interconnection of mental processes , and not on the material stuff that it is composed of Functionalists do not deny that human mental processes are a function of human brain activity . They simply throw open the criteria of mental activity to include computers , robots , or other human-made devices that exhibit the relevant processes (Levin , 2004

The field of artificial intelligence attempts to realize the functionalist theory and duplicate human cognitive mental states in computing machinery . For some time scientists have tried to replicate human thought processes in some kind of mechanical form . However , at that state of technology , the robot was little more than a wind up toy and it exhibited of the internal processes that functionalists would associate with thinking . Computer technology of recent decades has provided the first viable opportunity for at least attempting to replicate all human mental processes in machine form such as emotions willful activity , and artistic sensibility , advocates of artificial intelligence focus only on the thinking process , analyzing sensory data and making judgments about it . From a functionalist perspective , the dangerous claim about artificial intelligence is philosophically controversial since it holds that a computer can have human-like thoughts (Witherington and Crichton...

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